The National Museum of Colombia is not the tourist trap you would think it might be. At least when I was there I didn’t see any other tourists besides me and the gringa to whom I am married. The museum is in a section of Bogota called La Macarena not far north of La Candelaria and close to the financial district on Carrera 7. By the way, if you continue up the rather steep hill that forms the block behind the museum, and persist for another block up the hill, you will come to a street replete with all manner of restaurants, most of which appear to accept credit cards.
If you get off from the Transmilenio at Calle 26 and exit north, you can go two blocks east and be at the National Museum. You may experience some doubt, but when in doubt, go left—there is a stair left of the Juan Valdez that will lead you through what might appear from a distance to be an impassable building, and then you’ll see a fortress presiding in the foreground: that’s the Museo Nacional.
I went in search of a free concert, but it being the national museum and the local pass-time being to put things off or just cancel them (just ask the mayor of Bogota), the thing was canceled. Well, you always need to have a backup plan; the Museo Nacional is only 3,000 COPs so I forked over the cash, stashed my suspicious umbrella in the lockers, and headed into the crypt.
The first thing you encounter—after the obligatory busts of Bolivar and Santander—is a meteorite of rather impressive dimensions resting at the juncture of the three wings that form the galleries of this cross- shaped building. I though it a nice gesture to have the extra-terrestrial connection first. As you walk through the first four galleries (pre-conquest you have two long galleries and two small rooms), you also notice the damp. The damp is due to the fact that you are in the dungeon: the national museum being in a building that used to be the jail, and an interesting bit of architecture it is with the long views between the thick, whitewashed pillars and the sepulchral arches.
I found the collection in the first section meager, well spaced (as in spread out), interesting but rudimentary. The burial chambers they have replicated (in the smaller rooms) are the best part—rather creepy actually, but then, what else is the point of a burial chamber? One couldn’t help wishing the exhibit involved more burial chambers full of the ancient dead with all the accouterments, since otherwise there is a disappointing and definite lack of atmosphere to these first collections.
More than disappointing, though, it is to be wondered at that more pre-Columbian artifacts were not to be found, especially that the exhibits did not include reconstructions of villages, huts, and more general groupings of collections. It is true that there are a lot of different native groups for the museum to document, but the museum has a great deal of space it could use. Even if the real trove is all locked up in the gold museum, some scaled replicas—such as they have of La Pinta, La Niña y La Santa Maria—would not be entirely inappropriate. Unfortunately, one did not get much of a sense of the life and conditions of the people of Colombia’s past. Or, alas, the sense that these people mattered too much.
With the conquest, the museum gets going: we had more color, varieties of artifacts, music, and galleries that did not yawn as emptily (though there is still plenty of room, there is no lack of space in the dungeons of the Museo Nacional). It is a curious contrast, and one that reinforces the notion that in Colombia the sense of an ancient national heritage is not emphasized the way it is in a place like Mexico City, or as in Iceland where you feel, upon entering the national museum, that you have stepped into a treasure chest. A museum ought to feel a bit more like a treasure chest and less like an under-supplied trading post.
Of course, the exhibit at the Museo Nacional is housed in a very large building, and if you go to a museum to muse—I like to muse at musea—then there is much to be said for having stretches of real estate to oneself for reflection and contemplation. What is lacking, perhaps, at the Museo Nacional is not so much a lack of clutter but a lack of organic connections withing the exhibit. The objects are all placed in chronological order, but without further apparent organizing principles (well, there are a few things grouped in themes, but very few). This does little to aid in the interpretation and significance of the facts of history: which is the real business of the study of history. So you have one damn thing after the other, as Henry Ford put it, and it would seem that to the interested parties history would consist in a little more than that which Our Ford believed.
For all the dissatisfactions, the museum contains many valuable and interesting artifacts, constitutes a pretty impressive portrait gallery of the leadership of Colombia from the age of the Revolution till the middle of the previous century, and is a pleasant place to while away a few hours every so often. It is curious how the exhibit runs out at the time when the museum was founded—true, there are more contemporary paintings and sculpture from recent times, but the political and historical focus completely vanishes near the end of the 1940's. But along with the two former jail cells left to suggest a time when the museum was still the clink, these curious twists just add to the charm.
For the price, you can’t beat it. The Museo Nacional is worth going to, and if one is interested in the history of Colombia, in the contemplation of curious, beautiful, interesting, macabre, and even of objects from outer space, it is certainly not a bad place to go searching.
